Trust is everything there is in relationship [business or non-business related], and YouTube is repositioning itself in order to regain the confidence of its advertizers. To this end, the parent company of the video-streaming website has announced stricter rules to its monetization.

The new measure is Google’s way of raising the standard for the YouTube Partner Program. With this announcement, publishers will now be better positioned to make money through advertising. Before now, publishers required 10,000 total views to join the program. Going forward, channels with only 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of view time in the last one year will be able to join the program.

“Instead of basing acceptance purely on views, we want to take channel size, audience engagement, and creator behavior into consideration to determine eligibility for ads. That’s why starting today, new channels will need to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months to be eligible for ads. We will begin enforcing these new requirements for existing channels in YPP beginning February 20th, 2018,” Paul Muret, VP, Display, Video & Analytics wrote in a blog post.

Going forward, size will no longer be the sole determinant when it comes to suitability of a channel for ads. Other considerations such as community strikes, spam, and other abuse flags will be looked at. All these factors according to Muret, will be carefully looked at to ensure channels comply with YouTube policies.

“Both new and existing YPP channels will be automatically evaluated under this strict criteria and if we find a channel repeatedly or egregiously violates our community guidelines, we will remove that channel from YPP. As always, if the account has been issued three community guidelines strikes, we will remove that user’s accounts and channels from YouTube.”

Finally, Google said it will be introducing a new “three-tier suitability system” in the next couple of months. This system, according to Muret, is aimed at giving marketers more control over the trade-off between ads in more secure environments as against reaching more viewers.

Away from advertising and monetization, YouTube is reportedly testing a new dark theme for its iOS app. The new dark theme was spotted by a Reddit user who made the info available to the tech blog.

Not many people have seen the feature as at last Tuesday morning, which pretty much confirms the fact that it is still being tested and only available to a handful of users. The release note for version 13.0.1 made available by YouTube did not include any info about the dark theme feature.

YouTube formally announced Dark Themein the middle of last year after it quietly added it to its service without raising anyone’s eyebrow. Dark Theme, according to the company, is designed to “cut down” on glare and let you take in the true colors of the videos you watch. It [Dark Theme] turns your background dark, and enriches your YouTube experience.

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Ola Ric is a professional tech writer. He has written and provided tons of published articles for professionals and private individuals. He is also a social commentator and analyst, with relevant experience in the use of social media services.